The Trigger and the Parking Lot

I told you a few days ago about the workshop I attended recently at the Perimeter Institute (PI), which brought a number of particle theorists together with members of the CMS experiment, one of the two general purpose experiments operating at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC]. I described the four main areas of discussion, and mentioned a fifth issue that underlies them all: triggering. Today I’m going to explain to you one of two big advances in triggering at CMS that have recently been made public, the one called “Data Parking”. And I’ll also describe my small role in Data Parking over the last ten months, which will explain, in retrospect, some of the other articles that have appeared on this site during that period.

[This article is almost entirely about CMS, but CMS’s competitor, ATLAS, has also made public that they have something essentially identical (I think!) to Data Parking, which they call “Delayed Data Streaming”.]

Most of what’s there on that website isn’t relevant to Delayed Data Streaming. But if you look at the end of my article, where I briefly comment on ATLAS, you’ll find I already had put a link to the one relevant plot, and said a few words about it.

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A Higgs particle is produced in a proton-proton collision at center, and decays to two photons (particles of light, indicated by green towers) in an LHC detector. Tracks emerging from center are from remnants of the two protons.